Where You Live Actually Changes the Noises You Make

The Internet exploded a couple of weeks ago with Joshua Katz’s colorful map visualizations of American regional dialects, based on research by Dr. Bert Vaux of Cambridge University. The maps show who says what, where, noting the spread of regional dialects across the 48 contiguous states (Katz left out Alaska and Hawaii to simplify his statistical modeling). Katz also created a tool that allows users to see what cities are most similar linguistically to their hometowns (San Francisco, not surprisingly, is most similar to Oakland, California; San Jose, California; and Los Angeles, California; and least similar to Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana); listed cities were limited to those with a population of at least 200,000.

Though we all know that the subtleties of language vary by geography, new research shows that geography may actually influence how we speak—that the physical reality of a place may have directly shaped the linguistic structure found there. In a recent study of almost 600 languages around the world and their regional context, Caleb Everett of the University of Miami found a strong correlation between high altitudes and spoken languages that included “ejective consonants,” or consonants spoken with a strong burst of air.